Now that I’m more or less done with defence for a while, I’m turning my eye to education for a new policy on the Manifesto Project site. I'm still reading around the topic on a provisional basis. It's a lot harder than defence because I don't have a base level of interest in it. There's a lot of philosophical conflict for which there is no definitive answer.

Burnham's plan, announced today, to introduce more of a vocational slant is not without merit but there are compelling arguments for and against. The devil is in the detail. You don't even find firm agreement among teachers. It strikes me, then, that it makes sense to give schools the freedom to establish their own philosophies so long as they are maintaining a basic standard of literacy and numeracy - and let parents have a choice.

As it happen, thinking along those lines brought a memory rushing back. Not so long back, I was in New York and on the next street over from where I was staying there was a school with an A4 Skyhawk, a WWII Texan and a business jet in the playground. Turns out it was an aviation themed High School. I always thought themed schools would be a great idea, with the curriculum based around a particular technology or discipline.

With aviation there is massive scope for teaching maths, engineering, materials science, physics, history and geography, along with meteorology and navigation - hooking into development of drones, avionics and space tech. We would do well to make school more interesting. I didn't tune out of school because I wasn't academically inclined. I tapped out because I was bored to death. I would have loved this. Perhaps even giving kids the chance to restore an aeroplane.

I never got anything like that from my school. With Sea Cadets, though, I did a course with Dewsbury college where we took an engine out of an old car, stripped it, cleaned it and rebuilt it. Mechanical engineering wasn't for me, but it gave me a base literacy in the subject, exposure to an actual trade, and experience of a proper workshop. The modern learning environment is far too sanitised and sealed off from the real world. It strikes me that we need to reintegrate education with the rest of society. We need to think much bigger than Burnham's witless tinkering.

I would even go as far as making a technical vocational pillar in the curriculum compulsory for all. Technical illiteracy is a massive problem in politics and journalism. This is how you end up with windmills instead of power stations. You only need to look at politics to see how badly the education system is failing in terms of instilling a desire to learn.

A couple of polls today point to a recovery for Labour. It just takes a better showman than Farage to rob Reform of its lead. But it is only temporary. Burnham’s comms game is soon going to wear thin, and his gimmicks can only do so much. The Burnham bounce is temporary.

Reform's stagnation, however, is a separate matter and part of a longer trend. It still presents as an unserious party whose fortunes are tired to those of its leader. The ultimate test of a party is whether it can withstand the departure of its current leader, and on that basis, it does not look good for Reform. None of the necessary work commensurate with forming a government has been done. It is still not a serious proposition. Labour can slide south in the polls to Reform's advantage, but that still doesn't address the deep-rooted structural problems in Reform that will prevent it from securing a working majority.

One of the reasons Labour might just make a go of it is Burnham’s apparent seriousness in sorting out social care. In his first major interview since becoming prime minister, Burnham said he would not want to leave office without bringing in “substantial change” to the social care system. If Labour look like they are sorting this out, they'll get a crack of the whip, making an irrelevance of the right while it exclusively grunts about immigration. While immigration remains a top concern, social care is a low level slow burning crisis that has implications for everyone.

We have yet to see the details, not least because this agenda is based on the whims of the leader, but this is where it would have been useful for the right to have an armoury of policies they could use to spell out why the government is wrong and what they would do differently. This is another area where the parties of the right have nothing useful or interesting to say.

Health should have been a priority for the right, because while voters are concerned about immigration, they are equally concerned that close relatives are having to wait months and years for cancer treatments. Routinely, the electorate shows us they will put their immediate self-interest first despite what the polls say about which issue is most important. Something like social care is objectively important in its own right and voters do care about it yet the slop right has nothing to say on this.

This is why one of the main efforts of the Manifesto Project was on health. My view on it is that hospital are over burdened with unnecessary admissions due to the dysfunctionality of the GP system, further exacerbated by delays in discharge because the care system is a mess. It suggested to me the necessity to decentralise hospital functions, not least diagnostic services, to the community level, and centre care on the premise that the best place for recovery is in the home.

Regarding care homes (and I need to do more work on this) the entire system is not only broken. It's corrupt, often serving as visa mills for unwanted immigration, where exploitation and illegal working is rife.

I think the answer lies in restoring care work as a valid career path with structured career progression that can go to the very top of care administration, with possible diversions into qualified nursing. It requires additional incentives. To that end, I propose a system of tied district housing for supervising care nurses to live in the locality, with a view to improving retention and promoting long service. Service amounting to ten years will be rewarded with a discounted right to buy. The care system doesn't work if the people working within it don't care.

The slop right takes the view that the NHS is too broken to fix, thus do not attempt to offer solutions. They make vague overtures to privatisation of various functions and making huge cuts to back office administration, failing to understand that good administration is what makes the system work. They simply don't apply themselves to the actual problems. The fundamental error is talking about the NHS as though it were a single entity, when it is really just an umbrella brand for multiple organisations, some of which work very well. The problem is regional disparities in which case the task is to bring the worst performers up to the standard of the best.

Meanwhile, more needs to be said about the additional strain mental health problems add to the NHS. That requires better local community support to avoid unnecessary hospital admissions and preventative public health policies. If you ask me, it is not unconnected to the unhealthy relationship Brits have with alcohol, but as we have seen with Restore's attitude to smoking, it does not put any stock in public health policies. You find the same prevailing attitudes in Reform.

I'm a long way from having a full stack of solutions because as a policy area it's actually quite complicated, but it should be a priority area of study for any party serious about taking power - not least because as an issue it has the potential to eclipse all the main concerns they gripe about such as immigration, law and justice. In British politics, if you don't have a serious plan for health, you're not even in the game. This is all Reform’s website has to say on the matter…

If this is the best they can do, Andy Burnham need not lose any sleep over Reform.

According to the Telegraph, Wes Streeting has promised to resign as Defence Secretary if Andy Burnham fails to plug a black hole in Britain’s planned military spending. Mr Streeting revealed he would quit the Government if the new Prime Minister did not find an extra £4.7bn for defence in his first Budget later this year.

Speaking to Times Radio, Mr Streeting said the Defence Investment Plan would be “fully funded” and that the cuts or tax rises needed to fund its plans would be for John Healey, the Chancellor, to set out at future fiscal events. Asked whether a failure to fulfil those spending plans would be a resigning issue, Mr Streeting replied: “It is. It is absolutely for me a matter of principle.”

It is unusual for politicians to speak in such candid and concrete terms, so I think we can safely assume Streeting has been told he will get the funding somehow. John Healey also sees it as a point of principle, having resigned from the Starmer administration on that basis. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

For my part, I don’t think defence spending necessarily needs to rise. The total budget for Challenger 3 upgrade is £1.9bn for just 148 tanks, at a time when the value of Main Battle Tanks is in question, and when only half of them will be deployable at any one time. That kind of money would buy us two extra Type 26 frigates. Defence spending is all about opportunity cost. There are also some highly questionable drone procurement that require greater scrutiny.

But it would seem nobody is in the business of scrutinising defence spending. My own Tory MP has, for reasons that escape me, defended Ajax, while the slop right don’t have a defence spokesman or a policy between them. I checked Badenoch’s speech to confirm the Tory party position on defence. On June 15, 2026 she said “Our party’s position is that we should get to 3% by 2030, but as a minimum the funding must deliver the additional £28 billion over four years that the Chief of the Defence Staff has asked for”.

This where any respect I had for Badenoch evaporates. The party has not changed. She is correct to reject Net Zero because government by arbitrary targets is absolutely insane, but that goes for defence spending too. Moreover, the one thing you absolutely should not do is give the Chief of Defence Staff what they ask for. Here above all things, it requires a deep scepticism.

Politicians have grasped that we probably ought to invest something in our defence, and that we are behind the curve in drone technology, but there’s been absolutely no strategic thinking - thus the Defence Investment Plan runs the risk of being a corporate feeding frenzy, resulting in stockpiles of obsolete junk.

What is not sinking in is the new battlefield arithmetic, where the function of low cost drones is to drain your enemy’s bank account - as it is forced to deploy ever more expansive counter measures. The industry says it is working on low cost Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems but still with a unit cost that would buy a seven bedroom house in Surrey. They’re not getting it.

Meanwhile the defence chiefs are eyeing up new toys for a peer conflict we will likely never fight, while still neglecting the surface fleet. For sure, we have new frigates on order but in a decades time we still won’t have a more than a dozen serviceable fighting ships. The very last thing we should do is throw more money at defence until there is a coherent doctrine. Moreover, defence procurement is downstream foreign policy - where current thinking is in similar state of incoherence.

Worse still, politicians on all sides are talking about developing sovereign capabilities and reindustrialisation. While that is a laudable aspiration, it also runs the risk of becoming a middle class job creation scheme that produces mediocre, expensive and useless kit. Especially so if politicians are simply taking the word of senior defence staff as to what we need rather that starting from first bases - as I have.

This kind of thinking is too important to be left the the armed forces because they’re too fond of their expensive toys and their fantasy battle formations, regardless of where they’re likely to be deployed. We should also be extremely sceptical since half the defence pundits and MoD advisors are also consultants to the defence industry. The revolving door is real.

What we need to see from the Tory party is a coherent outline of foreign policy *then* an outline of a defence posture. Only then should we be talking about how we fund it and by how much. Giving the top brass a blank cheque to spend on elaborate toys without political direction and strategic coherence is the height of stupidity. Supporting Streeting’s bid for more funding without venturing an alternative vision is more of the same uniparty managerialism - all predicated on the consensus to continue the Ukraine war to the last Ukrainian - even if it drags us into World War Three. It doesn’t occur to them that we might well end up with other defence problems.

To understand a person, Napoleon Bonaparte famously noted that you must look at what was happening in the world when he was twenty years old. I don’t think that quite holds, but it is in keeping with my general theory that most people arrive at a settled internal pollical narrative at some point before they are forty years old, and it rarely deviates or evolves. People have certain tells that tell me not only what they think, and what influenced them, but also roughly when they stopped thinking.

It’s this point when most people become politically obsolete. The first name that leaps to mind when describing this dynamic is Jeremy Corbyn. A socialist relic whose political world stopped turning some time in the late seventies. Most people lack the agility to evolve - and to a very large extent, it applies to everyone, me included.

This is not a left/right thing either. The example in the image above is a very fine example. The debate about smoking in pubs hasn’t been a relevant debate for a long time. It is largely a settled issue and there is no great groundswell of desire to roll it back. You have to be stuck in time not to recognise that.

At heart, Rupert Lowe is a Thatcherite, or at the very least a first wave Thatcherism revivalist. But the problem with the revivalists is that they think conservatism is synonymous with doctrinal libertarianism - which is why conservatives have spent so long in the wilderness. Britain is not America. We do not have the same libertarian core values. Nobody wants what they are selling.

Probably the main point conflict between libertarianism and British conservatism is in the domain of public health. Libertarians do not see much of a role, if any, in regulating people's health choices. But this is a country in which we have socialised medicine, and there simply isn’t any desire to break with that. As such, the state does get a say in what we consume.

This is a debate I was having with David Betz last night in which I remarked that smoking isn't "a small, reliable pleasure for those with few others". As someone who smoked for twenty years, I can tell you that it tastes vile, ruins everything it touches, makes a bad cold last two months, causes chronic coughing, ages the skin, and absolutely stinks, and the only reason any smoker persists with it is because it's horribly addictive, and one of the hardest habits to quit. Most would quit if they could, and everyone who has quit wishes they'd quit sooner and winces when they think about how much money they wasted on a filthy habit that was of zero benefit.

On the whole, it is a social ill. Go to any slum town in the north of England and you'll still find rough-as-arseholes pubs where elderly men piss away their final years and smoke until they choke to death. It's a miserable end. You see them in elderly care homes hooked up to oxygen tanks, suffering a slow, undignified and painful death.

If you ask me, the good, and dare I say Christian, thing to do is not to abandon people to their ruin. If asked to elucidate on British values - values which are uniquely British, I would say they were to be found in the 1942 Beveridge Report in which Sir William Beveridge identified five major social evils: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Probably more than any other influence, this provide the moral basis for the modern British state. This is perhaps what is most lacking from modern politics. A sense of moral purpose.

In looking into this, I happened upon an extract from notes from the advisory panel on Home Affairs on Reconstruction Problems: the Five Giants on the Road, 25 June 1942 (T 161/1165). As regards disease, it notes:

“Attack on disease is a matter of prevention; second of cure. Prevention, beginning with health services in the narrow sense, spreads outwards into the problem of sanitation, housing, nutrition and local government. As to cure, opinion both public and professional, is probably ripe for a general re-organisation of the medical service of the community- so as to ensure that the best science o f the community- so as to ensure that the best that science can do is available for the treatment of every citizen at home and in institutions, irrespective of his personal means. There are practical difficulties and sectional interests to be overcome in this field as in dealing with want, but no fundamental political issues.

This is related to the section on squalor:

Squalor: The irresistible disorderly growth of great cities, which may be described in one word as conurbation, is almost as great a social evil as unemployment. It has involved in the past daily waste of life and human energy in needless travel, bad housing and ill health, needless exhausting toil for the housewife in struggling with dirt and discomfort, habituation of the population to hideous surroundings.

But we can go back further than that in establishing why public health is a legitimate function of government. Arguably, it is the main function of government as we know it. It again comes back to the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. The outbreak in London’s Soho district, which killed more than 600 people, provided decisive evidence that the disease was waterborne rather than airborne.

Physician John Snow mapped the deaths and traced them to a contaminated public pump on Broad Street; the local St James’s parish Board of Guardians, after hearing his evidence, ordered the pump handle removed. Sir Benjamin Hall, appointed President of the Board of Health in October 1854 amid the wider 1853–54 epidemic, accepted Snow’s findings, conducted house-to-house inspections in the affected area, and publicly criticised the chaotic patchwork of parish vestries, commissions and private companies that left sewers, drainage and water supplies uncoordinated and inadequate.

Hall’s experience of these administrative failures directly shaped the Metropolis Management Act of 1855. The Act abolished many of the overlapping local bodies, created elected vestries and district boards of works with clear sanitary responsibilities, and established the Metropolitan Board of Works as London’s first city-wide authority charged with major infrastructure - most famously Joseph Bazalgette’s intercepting sewers.

This legislation marked a decisive shift from fragmented parish administration to a more rational, elected local-government structure capable of delivering public-health improvements, and is widely regarded as a foundational step toward the modern system of British local authorities.

Rather than insult your intelligence with further elaboration, I think this rightly evolves into a wider public health role in stamping out a deadly addictive carcinogen and regulating foodstuffs which are known to be poisonous.

Libertarians rightly note that this has brought about a sprawling and bloated tier of government dedicated to hectoring people, but if there’s one thing that always struck me about libertarianism is how middle class it is. Libertarians prefer to leave adults to make their own informed choices, but you cannot make informed choices if you are not educated and alert to hazards that have genuine consequences for themselves and others.

Nobody likes excessive nannying by the state, or being told what to do and what they can eat, but at the same time, it does not follow that the state has no role in public health matters. A slippery slope exists but the same can be said of abandoning people to their fate. Allowing people to die of emphysema, cancer and diabetes just so long as it’s their choice to do so simply isn’t, and cannot be, the moral basis for our society.

While the Beveridge Report is the intellectual foundation of the modern welfare state, which is regarded as a left wing innovation, the principles underpinning it are profoundly Christian and conservative - in a uniquely British way. It is a rejection of laissez-faire neglect. Reciprocal duty, paired with limited but purposeful state action, Christian-inflected solidarity, and evolutionary British institutionalism, belongs as much to a conservative and Christian inheritance as to any socialist blueprint.

This is now central to the British psyche. Beveridge’s design fits this mould more closely than radical egalitarianism. It sought evolutionary consolidation of existing British institutions rather than revolutionary rupture; it prioritised insurance over means-tested relief (preserving the distinction between the “deserving” contributor and residual assistance); and it treated full employment and family stability as social goods essential to a healthy national organism. One Nation Conservatives from Disraeli onward had already accepted that the state must act to prevent social disintegration; Beveridge simply scaled that insight to the industrial age and the wartime experience of shared sacrifice.

The tension between those origins and later universalist, statist expansions remains one of the live fault-lines in British social policy - but no conservative proposes doing away with it in favour of neglect rooted in the ideology of free markets and freedom of choice. While conservatives have different ideas about how to meet our societal moral obligations, harnessing the power of markets, it does not extend to “let them eat 800 calorie frozen pizzas that give them diabetes and let them choke themselves to death”.

This is an attitude we often see from the slop right, from people who don’t really understand the origins of their own ideology. They profess to be Thatcherites, but Thatcher was only a libertarian is very specific domains. Thatcher was still guided by a very British moral code built on the same or similar instincts that produced the Beveridge Report.

It was only in later years (the IEA Torbyboy era) that conservative thought began to embrace doctrinal libertarianism (as much an American import as wokery), and it is telling that behind Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib’s assorted enterprises, the usual IEA suspects (Hannan, Littlewood, Starkey et al) sit on the advisory boards.

For all that Reform presents as a populist party, its intellectual origins (insofar as it has any) are bound to the ideas of its leader, who is one of that set. Men who never read Adam Smith’s other significant work, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which provides the ethical and psychological framework for Smith’s later economics in The Wealth of Nations. It shows that commercial society rests on a richer view of human nature than pure self-interest: people seek mutual sympathy, reputation, and the quiet approval of the impartial spectator as much as material gain.

There’s a reason Reform isn’t soaring in the polls and it’s the same reason Restore Britain is a dead end. Despite the noise makers projecting their own values on to them, the men at the core of the dissident right are Thatcherite revivalists shaped by libertarian ideology, all of whom would abolish the NHS in a heartbeat. People know this, and see them for what they are. Tories. The same Tories who spent the last half century dismantling the arms of the state that leads to the squalor we see today.

As I’ve note so very often, the reason illegal immigration is out of control, and the reason we see the proliferation of illegal HMOs, vape shops and Turkish barbers is because the right dismantled the invisible tier of government that detected these things along with the magistrates courts who prosecuted criminals. People who fail to understand that our “onerous regulations” are what set us apart from the third world.

And this is why I can’t really bring myself to support the parties of the slop right. They cannot fix what they themselves broke. Fundamentally, they are still guided by the same faulty ideas that did this to us in the first place. Of all the small parties, the closest there is to a proper British conservative party is the SDP. The rest of them are tainted by obnoxious American libertarianism as much as the left is captured by American Leftist notions of social justice. We must reject this cultural subordination and rediscover what British conservatism actually means.

I struggle to comprehend the level of hate it would take to batter an old lady to death with a hammer. Ann Widdecombe was struck twenty one times. I choose to believe it’s because it takes more than twenty blows to take a lady like her out. She was formidable.

But then I remember that Hope Not Hate exists. Hope Not Hate wants you dead for the opinions you hold. They have ways and means of achieving it, and sometimes they succeed. They label anyone to the right of them as far right, including Reform. I don’t recall who said it the other day (Ed Dutton I think) but the reason they took down their article on Ann Widdecombe is because it had done its job.

But they have other means at their disposal. They can leverage media to destroy reputations and intimidate, and have people excluded from public life and unpersoned. This is the reason people are being arrested for tweets.

They choose their rhetoric very deliberately to raise the temperature, knowing that they have radicalised activists who will answer their subtle calls to violence. On that basis, you could be forgiven for drawing parallels between Nick Lowles and Gerry Adams. It’s all designed to give them plausible deniability.

Make no mistake, despite their very carefully curated image and their proximity to power, Hope Not Hate is very much a terrorist organisation - among a few similar organisations with direct links to cells of violent activists.

When they talk about far right extremism, it’s mostly projection. The far right activists they usually refer to are people with sketchy politics but mostly confine themselves to holding up banners and putting stickers on lampposts. It’s the far left that’s engaged in an active campaign of intimidation and harassment. Politicians turn a blind eye to it, some arms of the state are captured and in their service, while others are enthusiastic collaborators. It should be viewed in the same context as the Muslim Brotherhood.

These organisations are the reason I always keep something I can use as a weapon by the door. Readers will recall that I protested the migrant facility at Linton on Ouse (peacefully). I wrote blogs and speeches. Then I had a Hope Not Hate “journalist” calling me a far right activist in The Times - and pretty soon I was getting threatening mail in the post.

It was disconcerting at first - to the extent that I reported it to the police, but through a process of deduction, I now believe it’s some tranny from the local branch of Stand Up To Racism. All the same, you can never be too sure, so I make sure I have the means to defend myself if needs be.

I’ve since been named in half a dozen far left articles online, all designed to make me a hate figure (despite my fairly pedestrian political views), and I’ve since had family members asking me to step back from political activism for my own safety (which is the intended effect of these campaigns). When I went to speak at the Traditional Britain Group, I was hounded by a far left mobs in the street, and the event could not proceed.

That’s exactly what is intended by Hope Not Hate. Their entire operation is designed to intimidate people and deter them from public participation. They are a low level stochastic terrorism outfit that feeds radicalised “antifa” youth. They are THE engine of disinformation in British politics. They are part of the reason Ann Widdecombe was battered to death with a hammer. They have blood on their hands.

I’m glad Andy Burnham is the new prime minister. Don't get me wrong, I know just how unspeakably awful he's going to be, but it really does help me underscore the point I've been making for the last three years. If your entire platform is based on slogans with no hard policy behind it, then you'll start making a fool of yourself within minutes of taking office, and the clock starts ticking on your administration's implosion.

This especially looks to be the case with Andy Burnham, whose first command in Number Ten was to put an end to rough sleeping, despite having utterly failed to do so in Manchester. Precisely what Burnham thinks can be achieved when we have no border control to speak of, I don’t know.

But Burnham doesn’t have a plan for anything else either. He’s got his Number 10 North gimmick and his Manchesterism hobby horse but nothing that speaks to stubbornly low growth, low productivity, high tax, out of control welfare spending, high inflation, high energy prices, heavy regulation and open borders. Labour might be enjoying a Burnham bounce in the polls but it’s not going to last.

In this, Burnham is in a double bind because his own ideology, insofar as he has one, prevents him from doing anything that might liberate the economy, and even if he could see his way to doing something useful, his own party will put the brakes on.

He’s stated his desire to make “changes people will feel” but that’s not going to happen without fixing the fundamentals, so all he has to work with is sticking plasters for which there is very little fiscal headroom. He’s going to be on the losing side of negotiations with the Treasury.

Consequently, Pollyanna Burnham has absolutely no idea what's about to happen to him. He has a head full of bad ideas that weren't tried by any of his recent predecessors, not because his predecessors were smarter than him, but because they were rapidly disabused before getting down to business.

Burnham, though, thinks that bad ideas will become good ideas if he's the one implementing them. For Burnham, the normal laws of political reality do not apply. There are hard lessons for him behind the door of Number Ten, waiting like starved crocodiles for their hapless prey.

While this is going to be endlessly entertaining and wholly predictable for us politicos, it is not without consequence. This is the gear shift that pushes the "just about managing" into the "not managing" bracket. This is the turn that pushes businesses and households irrecoverably into the red and upends what people have been struggling to maintain. This is the narcissistic clueless meddling that puts the country into a death spiral. The anger will be palpable.

By that, I don't necessarily mean the sort of riots triggered by the tone-deaf and ineffably useless Starmer. That cannot be ruled out, of course, but this is the inflection point where the normally reserved, who just prefer to get on with their lives, are dragged into the wake turbulence against their will. It's the bill hike that obliterates the last of their disposable income. It’s the denial of the last of the small pleasures that make the drudgery of making ends meet bearable - when there's no longer any reward for taking the punishment - and there's no end in sight.

This is when Burnham's entire psychological construct begins to dissolve. The world as he understands it is one where if you're nice, with good intentions, then you are liked - and the only reason you could dislike such a person is if you yourself are not nice. Starmer was better equipped to be hated because he had no empathy, and public sentiment of any kind had no bearing on his demeanour. Burnham, on the other hand, wants and needs to be liked. This is often a fatal flaw in politicians.

What makes Burnham especially dangerous is that he will pull at any and all levers in search of doing the nice thing, in order to be liked, oblivious to the second order consequences, and will be shocked, surprised and horrified to learn that his every action has the opposite of intended effect on public morale. He will not understand why. He is not capable of understanding why, even if it is explained to him in the most gentle terms by a compassionate softly-spoken primary school teacher.

Unlike Starmer, though, he won't go into the bunker to hide. He will take it to mean that people just haven't gotten to know him yet, and need to see more of him so they can understand that he's a nice guy and on your side. And when it doesn't work, he will blame the interface layer. If we don't get it, it just means something is lost in translation. That's when nice turns nasty.

This is the hole he will keep digging, the scab he simply won't stop picking until the sore becomes an open wound. WHY WON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW NICE I AM?? They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Burnham, though, does not plan to build a road. He intends to drill directly to Hell with industrial tunnelling machines. There is no force of magic that can make socialism work.

Crucially, what Burnham doesn't understand, is that the Labour party has become the party of the status quo for a reason. There is nowhere else for the left to go. Tony Blair, for all his many faults, was smart enough to understand certain economic laws of gravity. He shit-canned socialism because he knew that you can't hope to help people if the state is broke. He rebuilt the state as a managerialist welfare dispensary.

That might have been a viable avenue for 1997. But "sharing the proceeds of growth" is contingent on actual growth, which is no longer possible in a hyper-regulated, high tax moribund economy. Blairism is as dead as Burnham’s socialism. The bottom line is that there is no left wing solution to what ails us.

Burnham, though, believes enough time has passed for us to have forgotten, so that we'll mistake old ideas for new ideas. A lot of people probably will fall for it again, but it doesn't take very long to relearn the lessons. The Finding Out stage happens faster each time. On that basis, Burnham is not a man who will make it to the next election intact. He doesn't have much to work with. He has no mandate, no fiscal headroom, limited political capital, and absolutely no talent. A man promoted to captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. The only way for Burnham is down, down and down.

There is a lesson here for the parties of the slop right. You can win momentary popularity with slogans, and even win elections, but if you want to achieve something with power, you’re going to need a plan. The Burnham administration will be an object lesson in what happens when you don’t have one.

From day one I’ve been sceptical about supporting Ukraine. It should have been European foreign policy to steer clear of any moves that would give Putin any further pretext to invade while building up Ukrainian defences to ensure credible deterrence. But we didn’t do that. The next most intelligent position was to arm Ukraine sufficiently to hold the current lines and use our diplomatic influence to freeze the conflict.

The reason for that is that war is bad and dangerous. That’s something people seem to have forgotten. Such an approach would not have been optimal but from our perspective (the only perspective from which we should view it), there is nothing in that scrap of Eastern European rust belt that makes the escalation worth it.

By supplying Ukraine with long-range weapons with which to attack strategic targets deep inside Russia, we have turned this into a proxy war where we can no longer lay any credible claim to not being directly involved in the conflict. That has shifted the war up a gear to the point where it is spilling out, becoming one major hotspot among many. We are sleepwalking into a third world war. And here’s the thing. I do not want a third world war. It should be avoided. I don’t think I need to explain why.

You might have a different opinion about that, and you might even successfully persuade me your logic is sound, but what is not in dispute is that Britain is not ready for any kind of major conflict. Our already depleted armed forces are shrinking further in the wake of the Defence Investment Plan, and there is no coherent doctrine behind our existing defence spending. We are also badly behind the technological curve.

There is also the question of the national interest. In writing my defence policy for the Manifesto Project, I’ve been scrupulously neutral on the question of NATO. I do see the utility in maintaining Western interoperability, but I do not see the Western alliance as a reliable defence backstop. We cannot trust America.

There are two reasons for this. Trump is one of those reasons, and more broadly, the isolationist American right, many of whom have bought into the British insurgent right narrative that Britain is already conquered by Islam and a lost cause. Meanwhile, as the US grapples with an international humiliation over Iran, it will choose its allies on a much more expedient basis, and America cannot be trusted to respect or diplomatically uphold Britain’s claims to its overseas territories. Namely, the Falklands.

The other reason is the American left which is now completely captured by anti-Western influences. The special relationship is dead and demographic trends will bury it. Our fondness for Uncle Sam is not reciprocated.

Then, as I alluded the other day, Britain is not actually a coherent enough demos to fight any war. Young men born to immigrants will sooner decamp to their place of ethnic origin than die in a ditch in Eastern Ukraine or Estonia, and I don’t really blame them. Certainly I would oppose the complete obliteration of Britain’s technically competent native young men in a war against an enemy that poses no serious conventional threat to us. We should ready our maritime defences against Russia, but we have enough of our own problems. Low-level civil war is not a remote possibility.

You might then raise the issue of European solidarity, but France’s actions of late (flooding Britain with its unwanted garbage immigration) have not been those of an ally, and the EU will always side with Ireland’s progressive faction even though Ireland contributes nothing at all to Europe’s defence.

As much as anything, Europe’s own defences are badly degraded for the same reasons ours are. Neglect. Worse still, our industrial capabilities have been imploding over the last decade thanks to net zero policies. We do not have the industrial capacity for a long war, and Europe cannot expect any help from America since we’re leaving America to go it alone in dealing with Iran (which controls a vital supply of oil). As Ukraine grapples with Iranian drones and wider material support, Europe will not commit to any meaningful action against them.

It’s worth exploring here why Europe has collectively washed its hands of the Iran question. I was never wholly on top of the issue, but from the early days I was sceptical about what could be achieved by air power alone. That much is widely understood and the only way we are ever going to take the Iranian regime out of the picture is to put boots on the ground and remove it. But alas, after the catastrophic unfolding of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no appetite for that.

As to whether we should, I’ve been hesitant about that for much the same reasons. I don’t particularly want to see a nuclear-armed Iran and I think the world would be a better place without the Iranian regime’s persistent stoking of the Israeli-Arab conflict. But then toppling the regime brings instability of its own. There are compelling arguments on the web as to why Iran is not Iraq, and would not unfold in the same way since Persians do actually want rid of the regime, but Iran could become an Iraq for the same reasons Iraq became Iraq. Western military incompetence. That is the one constant.

But it’s a moot point. Europe can only afford one war of choice at a time, and it has chosen Ukraine. We are going to keep feeding ever more expensive and lethal weapons into Ukraine until it either becomes an all-out war, that could easily go nuclear, or until Russia collapses, which presents dangers of its own. It risks uncontrolled fragmentation, nuclear dangers, humanitarian crises, and power vacuums filled opportunistically (especially by China and Iran). Any way you look at it we are drifting towards total chaos, because nobody has the good sense to avoid it. Arguably, World War Three has already started.

Meanwhile, Britain’s immediate security interests are being overlooked entirely. While Ukraine and Iran soak up our attentions, little attention is paid to the unravelling of Africa. Russia being significantly reduced or expelled from its key footholds in Africa (primarily the Sahel states of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger via the Alliance of Sahel States, plus Central African Republic, Sudan, and others) would have major ripple effects.

Africa Corps (Russian Ministry of Defence-controlled paramilitary organisation) provides regime protection and limited counter-insurgency for military juntas that seized power via coups (2020–2023). Their removal would likely accelerate advances by groups like JNIM (Al-Qaeda affiliate) and IS Sahel. Jihadist sieges on capitals (already occurring near Bamako), fuel/power disruptions, and territorial losses could intensify. Mali has already seen coordinated attacks killing officials and overrunning northern bases.

As it happens, things are unfolding all over Africa. South Africa is in a state of ongoing collapse which will soon accelerate. Sudan is in the middle of a brutal civil war which shows no sign of ending soon, and has created the world’s largest displacement crisis and one of the worst humanitarian emergencies globally. The situation is extremely dangerous. The RSF’s push toward El Obeid has triggered urgent international warnings of potential mass atrocities. The humanitarian crisis is worsening rapidly, with famine, disease, and displacement feeding into each other.

And you know what that means. A massive wave of migration. This is where the British right has no strategic depth to its thinking. The clamour is to end foreign aid and fight the immigration war at our own border. This is dangerous because it risks further destabilisation in Europe and a souring of Anglo-French relations.

As such, there is a strategic case for foreign aid as part of a layered approach to foreign policy. There are two immediate tasks for any incoming government. The first is that the asylum system, as currently constituted, must be closed. The concept of refuge rests on the premise that wars eventually end, allowing refugees to return home once they do. To make that return realistic, refugees should ideally remain in neighbouring countries, since this both speeds up eventual repatriation and supports regional rebuilding once conditions allow it. Refuge should, as a rule, only be granted on the same continent as the conflict that produced it.

Where Western nations want to help (and service their own security interests), the more effective and more honest form of assistance is to fund orderly refuge systems in the regions themselves, preventing the kind of destabilisation that triggers secondary migration further afield. Investment in peacekeeping, healthcare and clean water access does more to contain a conflict and support a displaced population than accepting a fraction of that population thousands of miles away.

That is the limit of any moral obligation, and it happens to align closely with our own self-interest. Western countries are not morally obliged to accept an open-ended number of refugees simply because a crisis exists somewhere in the world.

By conducting this kind of activity, Britain has a claim to moral leadership which strengthens its case of principled ECHR non-compliance (with much more aggressive border security employing FPV drones to puncture dinghies in French waters). It doesn’t require us to find any extra money since we just use the money we’re currently spending on asylum.

This in my view is necessary even if the plan is to leave the ECHR (which is neither intelligent nor necessary). If Britain is making the case that it does not need to be part of the ECHR in order to operate to higher standards then it actually has to be an exemplar. That much-vaunted “global leadership”. Britain is going to have to build up political and moral capital because something tells me our foreign policy is going to require much bolder and aggressive moves as the global order begins to unravel.

This, though, brings me back to defence policy. We cannot hope to have a coherent defence policy without a coherent foreign policy. With all of the above in mind, Britain should be less concerned with equipping for a high-tech peer fight on the plains of Eastern Europe, and more concerned with extending its maritime deterrence and peacekeeping expeditionary capabilities which suggests maintaining our COIN capabilities. We cannot be everywhere doing all things. If we are to do anything well, we need to decide what the national interest is and where our strategic priorities are.

In that respect, my own foray into defence policy has fallen victim to the same lack of coherence. Most of the intellectual effort has gone into understanding high-tech battle formations with Ukraine and Russia in mind, when it’s more Europe’s problem than ours, and well within the means of Poland and Germany to sort it out for themselves if they get their act together.

We can assist with that much. My thinking on defence at the moment is that we should give our entire fleet of main battle tanks to Ukraine along with whatever Ajax junk got delivered. At the very least, they can strip out the electronics and put them to better use. Britain needs to start over, not least because Ukraine has rendered most of our land forces doctrine obsolete. Current British doctrine is flawed on two basic counts.

Firstly, the accountancy tier pushing for fleet standardisation and common platforms. This doesn’t work. Combat vehicles either have to be general purpose or built from the ground up for a particular purpose. The modular approach looks very good on paper, but in practice it just leads to vehicles that don’t do any job well and seldom work.

The second problem is the obsolete doctrines driving procurement that simply haven’t kept up with the pace of change. Big set-piece armoured thrusts are never going to be relevant again. The battlefield now favours light, fast, unmanned technologies. We’ve seen enough drone footage now to know that any form of vehicle is rapidly detected and soon eliminated. The lifespan of an average conscript on this kind of battlefield is now measured in minutes. The digital battlefield is area denial.

The defence pundits I’m reading seem to think we simply have to get used to the idea of heavy losses to retake ground, and for that you need massive expendable armoured thrusts. I can see the logic, but we’re now in the era of mass-produced low-cost anti-tank missiles, GPS-guided artillery and drone swarms, at a time when close air support is similarly obsolete and the airspace is also closed to anything that isn’t small and unmanned. With the advent of autonomous drones, air superiority doesn’t buy you very much.

The issue is not strictly the armoured thrusts themselves, it’s the inability to form up and mass forces prior to the thrust. The modern battlefield is saturated with sensors and they can see such things coming a mile off. You’re attacked before you even launch.

Again, we can draw certain conclusions from Ukrainian tactics. We’re now seeing much more aggressive deep strikes aimed at crippling Russian infrastructure, with a view to eroding industrial capacity and creating civilian disquiet. There’s a reason for this. With limited manpower, Ukraine cannot risk an all-out assault to retake lost territory. It’s too big a gamble. Ukraine only has to lose one major engagement for it to be game over. Britain would face the same constraints given how few troops and vehicles we have.

As to what we should buy instead, that’s a more difficult question. I’m leaning towards the view that saturation artillery is the only way to push the front forward. I was leaning in the direction of light tanks with big guns, procured in sufficient numbers to endure big losses, augmented by unmanned platforms, but then I had an important epiphany.

Western defence procurement is shit. Not only is it shit, it is never not going to be shit. Supposing the doctrines we arrive at are correct, they are obsolete by the time vehicles are delivered, and what does get delivered will be late, over budget and too complicated. Bureaucracy cannot meet the demands of a highly fluid battlespace.

I think, then, that the model for drone production currently employed by Ukraine should apply to everything. Right now, their drone production is distributed over hundreds of small workshops, taking telemetry directly from the battlefield and feeding it into new innovations. What matters, then, is that they have the basic components to work with and the means for units to cobble their own solutions together.

I think that could also work with fighting vehicles. My idea is as follows, and feel free to shoot me down. We establish a fighting vehicles sandbox at a dedicated facility. RAF Topcliffe would be my nomination because you can develop it there. Rather than giving specifications for whole weapons systems to the likes of BAE Systems, we just buy generic off-the-shelf trucks, quads, bikes, sensors, guns, missiles, mortars, MRAP chassis and let units cobble together their own kit and see what works. Give combat units their own engineers, mechanics and developers, and deploy them to forward positions.

Essentially, we have to take the accountants and the bureaucracy out of the loop and create a more flexible development environment. If we then happen upon something that really works, we can proliferate the knowledge between units, harden up specifications and feed them back into mass production.

It seems to me that any procurement is dead in the water the nanosecond you introduce it to the LinkedIn class. What we need is for the geeks to inherit the earth - linking up tech colleges directly with the forward engineers and demoting MoD procurement to just sourcing bog-standard components and platforms.

If it turns out that we do need force mass, I think we’d do better with a universal platform like the JLTV that we can deploy in the thousands, each with mission-adaptable kit from the quartermaster hangars, and let the soldiers choose their own tools. Meanwhile, it is vital to maintain a force of MRAP vehicles in the event of any African deployment.

The bottom line is that we’ve been attempting to fix centralised procurement for decades. We failed, and we’re going to keep failing. As such, we need to get back to ad hoc innovation in the best spirit of British make-do-and-mend. It cannot possibly be any worse than the situation we find ourselves in now.

Again, though, I reiterate that military coherence is downstream of foreign policy coherence - but that is far downstream of political coherence, which brings this blog back to its usual fare. British politics is hopelessly degraded and getting worse all the time. The incoming replacement prime minister is set to surpass his predecessor in the unpopularity and incompetence stakes, since he’s as much of a throwback to a previous iteration of Labour as Jeremy Corbyn was. Andy Burnham has a leather-bound man-bag full of 1997 ideas and is all set to crash and burn(ham).

As dreadful a prospect as that is, the British right shows no great promise either. The slop-right has nothing in the way of policy or expertise to bring to bear, perhaps pointing to a recovery of the Tory party, but there’s no sign of perspicacity there either. British politics is increasingly parochial and more concerned than ever with the soap opera of Westminster politics. Our politics is not fit for purpose and our media is even worse. You know, folks, I think we might be in trouble. Britain is sleepwalking into someone else’s war, and we can’t even be sure which one.

In producing my defence policy for Manifesto Project, one thing I tried desperately hard not to do was to fall down a defence punditry rabbit hole. I totally failed. I’ve now been completely absorbed in all things defence for the last few days.

To be fair, it is an endlessly fascinating area of policy, and one that is highly consequential on several fronts. It’s also more interesting than the Westminster soap opera.

Here I find the lines can very easily blur between defence policy and land warfare doctrine or tactics. But there’s a reason for this. Individual decisions about the order of battle can be intensely political, not least the Ajax debacle when so much taxpayer’s money is at stake - and when, if we are forced to fight a war, we want to win it. It is necessary, then, to understand the thinking that brought us to a state where we’re lumbered with a white elephant that doesn’t work.

Ajax, it seems, is a classic example of muddled and conflicting specifications based on an obsolete concept, and the defence bureaucracy simply cannot keep pace with the rate of change. That, though, not altogether surprising. I don’t think there has ever been a situation quite like this where tactics and technologies are changing every other week.

The temptation is to believe that Britain is uniquely awful when it comes to expensive failures, but this kind of debacle goes with the territory. It is an inherent facet of bureaucracy the world over, and it’s especially acute in defence. Germany has had similar problems. To expect defence contractors to take a design brief for something that’s never been tried before, and deliver it on time and on budget is too much to ask.

One thing you notice about new generation combat vehicles is the extent to which they are overburdened by complex and expensive technology, and electronics systems that will be next to impossible to service in the field. While any defence doctrine does better if the directive is to keep it simple, designing a vehicle or weapons system capable of surviving on the modern battlefield is going to be inherently complex. There are always trade-offs.

The iron law of fighting vehicles is that you can’t have something that is complex, reliable and cheap. The Ajax debacle is nothing at all new under the sun. Expensive and embarrassing failures are the norm.

On that basis, it is usually the case that decision makers have to just pick something and stick with it, not only to save face, but also to ensure we’re not left with nothing at all. Nearly every big ticket item pressed into service has to undergo a refinement process for the first ten years at least, and in some cases, there is never a settled variant. By the end of their service no two Gloster Meteors were alike. Experimentation is integral to warfare.

But then, as we have come to learn, sometimes it is better to suffer a capability gap than to be lumbered with something that will never work, that will hoover up all of your defence budget. I suppose the trick is knowing when to cut your losses and pull the plug.

That’s certainly the case when you’re close to the razor’s edge when mistakes can be fatal. When under imminent threat of invasion, you do not have the luxury of procrastination - which is why Estonia has cancelled its €500M combat vehicle purchase to boost drone defence. The decision to cancel its significant CV90 replacement programme comes in the wake of wayward strike drones entering its airspace, and that is informing the decision.

This is the dilemma for all NATO forces now, who are invested in big ticket items like Challenger 3, Ajax, Boxer, Puma and Apache. Letting go is hard to do. But they must. Challenger 3 in my view is one of those things that should not go ahead. We have 148 on order, but if even half of that number (which is already far too few) are ever combat ready I’ll be astonished.

Because we’re so heavily invested in them, though, defence pundits have reinvented the MBT as a command node for use with fantasy unmanned formations - when the accompanying unspecified vehicles for mass formations don’t exist, and if they do, will last all of about four minutes in drone swarm country.

The same excuses, meanwhile are being made for the Apache, reinvented as a “mission management nexus” when the writing is already on the wall. Attack choppers are increasingly useless drone fodder we cannot afford.

This, in my view, is why defence doctrine level decisions are political, and policy documents are the right place for this kind of discussion. Generals can get too attached to their toys and someone needs to step in and make unsentimental choices. That’s the business of politics. We cannot allow our defence doctrine to be shaped by (and around) relics of the Cold War because their mistakes will get us all killed.

Put simply, set-piece armoured thrusts are an obsolete concept. When both sides are producing anti-tank missiles at relatively low cost, sending tanks into face prepared positions is completely pointless. Light anti-tank infantry has become the mainstay of current thinking even in the ranks of the British army. One thing generals on both sides of the Ukraine war are scratching their heads over is what Putin plans to do with the tanks he’s amassing. They simply are not useful to him except as a very short-lived diversion.

One of the lessons we can learn from the war in Ukraine is that tank-on-tank engagement are actually quite rare, and the biggest threat to tanks is mines, drones and guided artillery. If the objective is to deny a peer enemy the opportunity to take territory then overwatch battlefield surveillance paired with precision artillery is where the investment must go. Not for nothing is the Ukraine war characterised as WW1 with drones. Armoured thrusts are the equivalent of sending men over the top to be massacred by heavy guns. Not something you can do when you have critical manpower shortages.

Retaking territory, then is much more involved. We have to configure and equip forces to dominate the transparent battlefield, achieve local superiority in drones (ISR + loitering munitions) and electronic warfare to blind the defender’s sensors and strike assets, and extend the “kill zone” and interdict logistics, command nodes, and reserves deep behind the lines with long-range precision systems. The two basic pillars are as follows:

• Suppress and attrit. Use precision artillery, rocket systems, and massed cheap drones to degrade the defender’s artillery, air defences, and forward positions. This creates temporary local windows where enemy fires are neutralised or greatly reduced.

• Conduct limited, supported ground actions. Exploit the windows with dispersed small units rather than massed formations. Infantry advances under drone overwatch, supported by robotic systems for mine breaching and initial assaults. Protected vehicles (tanks and IFVs) are used judiciously for mobile protected firepower where conditions allow, not as the main effort. Success comes through successive limited objectives rather than one decisive breakthrough.

As such, if there is a role for tanks they need to be agile, fast, and expendable. Not 70 tonne £20m-a-pop behemoths, and IFVs must have serious firepower - which neither Boxer nor Ajax have. The best armour protection they can have is an artillery and drone screen.

The lesson from Ukraine is unambiguous: the era of heavy, expensive, and slow-to-adapt platforms as the centrepiece of land power is over. If we are serious about both deterring aggression and retaining the ability to retake territory, then defence policy must stop trying to prop up relics of the last century and instead make the hard political choices that align spending with the battlefield as it actually exists.

That means ruthlessly cutting programmes that cannot be made relevant quickly, and redirecting resources at scale into mass attritable drones, precision munitions, electronic warfare, and lighter, faster, more expendable ground systems. The alternative is to keep pouring money into systems that will be neutralised before they ever reach the fight and to discover, too late, that sunk-cost white elephants costs far more than money.

Defence is shaping up to be one of the longest and most comprehensive policies on the Manifesto Project website. I could, and probably will, add more detail. It is an inherently interesting area, with a great deal happening. Every nation on earth is having to revisit its defence doctrine and re-equip for battlefield concepts that simply weren’t on anyone’s radar a decade ago.

Occasionally I have to remind myself not to go down the kit-stroking rabbit hole. Policy should set tone and general direction rather than making equipment recommendations at the micro level. One of the strengths of the framework so far is that it doesn’t go in for blank-slatism. It is grounded in sorting out the messes within existing constraints.

Here, I approach the armed forces the same way I approach political parties. I ask what they are actually for and whether they themselves know. Wherever you find dysfunction, you tend to find a root definition problem. The reason the IDF proves so lethal is because it knows what it is for, who it is fighting and where.

Britain’s position is more complicated. It must protect its overseas territories, maintain its NATO commitments, sustain a credible domestic defence force and a deterrent. The real complication is the direction of travel and the divergence between the governing class and the wider public.

The establishment sees Russia as the predominant threat while also keeping an eye on China. But in the public eye NATO does not enjoy quite the same reverence it once did, and there is no public appetite for foreign adventures or even peacekeeping interventions. The tilt on both the fringe left and right is towards isolationism and neutrality, and the fringes often indicate the direction of travel. This is a generational pivot.

As a result the gulf between the public and the state will only widen. Foreign expeditions do not enjoy the necessary public backing. Meanwhile the left seems in rather a hurry to dispense with any British overseas territories.

We are a nation that cannot agree who the enemy is, or even whether there is an enemy. Many on the right observe that the greatest threat to the British way of life is the establishment itself, not least by its refusal to maintain our borders. Meanwhile there isn’t even agreement on what constitutes Britishness.

With a deeply fragmented demos and so little common ground even among natives, there is no sense of national unity, thus no sense of national purpose, no sense of common endeavour, no shared values, and therefore no coherence to foreign policy — especially when it is heavily influenced by immigrant cohorts. A country in the middle of a full-blown identity crisis, to the extent that nobody is in a rush to fight for Britain, cannot hope to arrive at a coherent approach to defence.

This fragmentation has direct consequences for the armed forces themselves. Recruitment and retention problems are not simply questions of pay or marketing. They reflect a deeper reality: when Britishness is contested and large numbers of people living in Britain do not regard the country as their primary loyalty, the willingness to serve, let alone to fight and die for it, steadily erodes. A military drawn from a divided society will struggle to maintain the cohesion and morale required for anything beyond low-intensity operations.

The same problem makes any serious defence strategy politically unsustainable. A government that commits to NATO deployments, forward presence or higher defence spending will eventually face resistance once the costs become visible in blood or treasure. Without a shared national interest that the majority of the population recognises and is prepared to defend, even necessary policies lose legitimacy the moment they demand sacrifice.

In that respect even the most pragmatic and realistic attempt to devise a defence policy for Britain is working to a hypothetical version of a unified country that, in the real world, no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

Restoring the cohesion required for credible defence policy would demand more than new white papers or increased spending. We need to regaining meaningful control over who enters and remains in the country, so that assimilation can actually occur rather than being overwhelmed by continuous inflows. It would also require institutions to stop treating the historic British population and its culture as just one interest group among many, and instead treat national continuity as a legitimate priority. Without these foundations, talk of “shared values” or “common purpose” remains rhetorical.

The political barrier is substantial. Much of the governing class has spent decades arguing that national identity is outdated or dangerous, while demographic change has created new electoral incentives that reward further fragmentation. Reversing course would therefore need a sustained shift in elite incentives and public pressure strong enough to overcome institutional resistance. Countries that have successfully maintained higher levels of cohesion in the modern era have generally done so by prioritising cultural compatibility in immigration policy and refusing to apologise for the existence of a core national identity. Britain has done neither for a generation.

I think I'm going to be hung up on the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) for a while. For entirely self-indulgent reasons I’ve committed to beefing up the defence policy on the Manifesto Project. The DIP has to be at the heart of any policy analysis because it shows us the current assumptions of modern British defence doctrine.

It seems we are all but abolishing helicopters. I partially explored this yesterday but it’s even worse than I assumed. While we are getting a limited number of additional Chinooks, I am reminded that the existing fleet, in terms of airframe hours, is getting on up there. Once retired, the overall number of airframes could plummet.

We then learn that RAF Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance capabilities are seriously threatened. We are set to see the early retirement of the Shadow R1 (pictured), while the MoD is committed to Project CORVUS: £310m additional investment in long range surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, including the next generation of uncrewed aerial systems to replace legacy Watchkeeper drones. According to the DIP, up to 24 new surveillance drones will be delivered by 2029.

Less than impressed, RUSI says...

As is found with newer platforms such as Elbit’s 650 Spark or DZYNE Technologies ULTRA, 24 hour endurance, with related sensor payloads, can only realistically be achieved by a UAV in the NATO Class 3 Medium-Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) category.

The decision to acquire such a drone is inconsistent with both the MOD’s assessment of the threat environment and data from contemporary conflicts. Corvus will replace the troubled Watchkeeper drone program which took 14 years to reach full operational capability and was declared obsolete last year by Minister of State Lord Coaker, who argued that lessons from Ukraine showed that MALE UAVs were not survivable. This is in line with a 2020 assessment by the US Air Force which concluded that this class of drones cannot survive in contested airspace.

The vulnerability of such UAVs is currently being demonstrated in Yemen. The Market Engagement Notice for Project Corvus comes after at least 15 US MQ-9 Reaper drones have been shot down over Yemen since late 2023, a toll that spiked after the Trump administration’s renewed air campaign on 15 March 2025. Losses, according to the Houthis, could be as high as 22 airframes, although the group often makes false claims. This is a strong indicator that Corvus is not a sound investment. But that doesn’t mean the Army can do without a means of finding targets.

More damningly, it says...

The Houthis have a long history of rapid tactical innovation alongside their Iranian advisors, and clearly have capable air defences. This was illustrated in 2018 when a Saudi Arabian F-15S, tracked by the Houthis with a FLIR system, deployed flares and accelerated before being hit by a surface to air missile (SAM).

Several US Reapers were lost to the group before the current conflict, including one shot down in 2019 which CENTCOM assessed was engaged with Soviet-era SA-6 and SA-7 SAMs.

More recently, the loitering 358 Saqr Iranian SAM used by the Houthis, Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Hezbollah, have had far more success. Israeli losses of Hermes MALE drones over Lebanon including the 450 model that the Watchkeeper was based on, and the larger 900 model, are more evidence that MALE drones are at acute risk. And yet, the Houthis cannot be considered a peer adversary.

Evidence of MALE drone performance in peer conflict is demonstrated by the near total destruction of Ukraine’s Bayraktar TB2 fleet after a few days of successful strikes at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with one Ukrainian pilot calling the drones ‘almost useless’ against Russia’s layered air defences.

The point demonstrated here is that even in the airspace above non-state actors MALE drones lack survivability. But the British Army wants to use such a platform as a Corps reconnaissance asset, and therefore suggests it is to be used in peer-warfighting.

Essentially we’re looking at £310m wasted on something that is conceptually obsolete. For an effective interim solution, the priority should be the rapid acquisition of smaller, low-cost, attritable tactical unmanned systems that can be fielded in much greater numbers. The emphasis must be on resilience through quantity rather than reliance on a small number of exquisite platforms. High-capability ISR assets in a peer conflict are too vulnerable and have become obsolete. The game is now cut-price COTS sensors, widely distributed in a multiplicity of formats - networked via commercial comms and integrated via AI.

RUSI suggests alternative approaches for the UK could include investing in low-earth orbit satellites, and in the near term, sourcing affordable options such as high-altitude balloons in the stratosphere (a current US project) or tethered aerostats (available through UK providers), which support an array of sensors providing surveillance over hundreds of kilometres.

What the DIP shows us is that the MoD is working to outdated models, has not kept abreast of recent developments, and is somehow missing all of the important lessons which are now widely understood in the public domain. As I dig deeper into it, there seems to be a mix of obtusity, naivety and delusion, stitched together with hopeless optimism. As such, it would appear our most urgent problem is the cultural problem inside the MoD and its interface with the treasury. Meanwhile, the likelihood of intelligent media scrutiny is vanishingly small.

Now that I’ve updated the Manifesto Project as far as I’m going to in this round of upgrades, now comes the hard part. Shooting it down. Parties have a tendency to produce policy, then dump it on their website to gather dust without being an active part of the comms or campaigning, and as such, it can very rapidly fall out of date.

I’m of the view that you have to keep everything under continual review, and make sure you’re not clinging on to bad ideas just because they’ve served you well in the past. Moreover, it’s better if you spend some time shooting down your own polices rather than have opponents do it for you. This is a much slower process that involves monitoring current developments.

In this case, I’m reviewing my own thinking on defence. You might dispute certain arguments in my defence policy but I think I’ve a arrived at a fair comprehensive basic framework which I will develop over time. But, of course, policy often falls over on specifics.

What makes defence especially difficult right now is that all of the major defence doctrines of my lifetime are rapidly going obsolete, and with them, a lot of the mainstay technologies. The Ukraine battlefield is rewriting the rulebook on a weekly basis, which prompts of lot of the thinking that went into the UK’s Defence Investment Plan.

So far, I haven’t seen anyone I regard as serious who thinks they hybrid navy concept is a good idea, and the more you look at it, the more it looks like a smokescreen for a programme of major defence cuts and downgrades in our maritime capability.

What’s even less clear is the MoD’s decision to retire the Wildcat helicopter (pictured) a decade early. It is argued that its recon functions can be performed just as well by “drones”, which is indeed arguable, but it still suffices as a utility helicopter. There might be better utility helicopters around but the the cheapest option we have right now is to use the kit we actually have.

Anything else marks a substantial downgrade in rotary capabilities. Despite new and emerging battlefield threats, I don’t see a scenario any time in the foreseeable future where there won’t be a use for general purpose helicopters somewhere in the stack. What’s perplexing is that if the MoD views Wildcat as too vulnerable on the modern battlefield, why then are we still keeping the ludicrously expensive Apache going? In Ukraine (since 2022), the forward edge of the battle area is lethal for slow rotary-wing assets. FPV drones, loitering munitions, and MANPADS have downed a lot of Russian Ka-52s and Mi-8s.

This is actually a much more interesting question to which I have not yet arrived at a satisfactory answer. The Apache has something of a cult status and a reputation for potency on the battlefield, but in the past it has mostly operated in relatively uncontested battle spaces, and doesn’t perform especially well when there is competent and organised resistance. It has never been tested against a peer enemy or in the drone rich battlefield.

So far as I can work out, the Apache still has value as part of combined manoeuvres, directing drone and counter drone operations, in conjunction with other technologies. The Apache may not be obsolete but the traditional tactics are. I do wonder, though, if the Army pleaded for its continued service just because they like it. I mean, who doesn’t love an AH-64D?

I suppose, given the rate of development of counter-drone and SEAD technologies, there is still a role for helicopter gunships in second wave operations once the battlefield has been cleared of unmanned threats. But to be quite honest with you, I am still none the wiser, and give the conflicting opinions between those who apparently do know what they’re talking about, I guess we’re going to have to find out the hard way.

Despite that, what’s clear is that decision makers still haven’t grasped the economic warfare dimension. The utility of the the helicopter gunship is diminishing, while its price tag keeps going up, as does the cost of advanced munitions at a time when potential enemies are achieving mind-blowing economies of scale with drone production. Whatever the new gunship doctrine is, if it is valid at all, it won’t be valid for more than a few weeks at most, and our very expensive fleet becomes useless junk.

This is a problem across the board, and something I pressed on heavily throughout the defence policy. We cannot afford our habit of buying expensive kit according to obsolete doctrines which are too expensive to lose, and too expensive to procure in useful numbers. This is especially true of Ajax.

Interestingly, from an operational perspective, if not procurement, the USAF seems to understand this. Economics are most certainly a factor if the military objective is to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. While there have been repeated attempts to retire the venerable A10 Warthog, nothing else can put a munition down with any accuracy that costs as little as $50 to $136 each, and compared to the F35, operating costs of the A10 are negligible. This is why we’ve been seeing hogs cycling in and out of RAF Lakenheath (though not when I’m there with my camera - to my extreme annoyance).

Still, though, the USAF is operating in a relatively uncontested space at sea. The comparable SU-25 has not fared very well in Ukraine (63 combined losses), seemingly putting to bed any notion that a low cost turboprop CAS aircraft has a role to play either.

But while we’re on the subject of helicopters, there is then still the question of the medium lift replacement for the Puma. The MoD has settled on the highly capable AW149, but the decision was less to do with with what we actually needs, and what gives us the most bang for our bucks, and more to do with maintaining the illusion of sovereign capability and keeping jobs at the former Westland factory at Yeovil. The plant would have been better occupied with upgrades to the European Merlin fleet. As a consequence, we’re going to end up with fewer helicopters than we actually need, just as we’re retiring older Chinooks and shit-canning Wildcat.

Taken as a whole, then, it looks like the Defence Investment Plan is a splurge on vapourware without a coherent doctrine behind it, while everything else takes haircut. The medium lift requirement was for 44 airframes but we’ll be lucky if we end up with 23 - and will probably get roped into doing the job vacated by Wildcat, wasting airframe hours in the process.

While I am not a defence expert, you don’t have to interrogate UK defence policy too deeply to notice that we’re no closer to digging ourselves out of the hole we’re in. This is especially true of the Royal Navy which is looking down the barrel of long term capability gaps, with the vague promise of unmanned vessels in the near future which, as any realist knows, simply isn’t going to happen. Meanwhile the politicians are equipping the army for a war it isn’t gong to fight, with no helicopters, vehicles that don’t work and super heavy tanks that cost too much to deploy anywhere dangerous. We are a long way from getting this right.

To my considerable irritation, the article I wrote the other day was surprisingly well received on X. It irritates me because it’s nothing I haven't been saying for months (and possibly years now) - and I usually get abuse for saying it. It just takes Reform’s current woes for it to sink in. I’ve seen two polls in the last couple of days that show a two point drop in Reform’s poll lead, which is part of a stagnation trend for the party.

Whether or not this is terminal remains to be seen. Reform’s performance is tied to the performance of the ruling party, and I don’t think it will take very long for Burnham to make an enemy of the British electorate. All the same, that doesn’t make Reform any more of a viable prospect for government.

My hunch is that Reform’s underlying troubles mean that it is no longer poised to overtake the Conservatives. The polls tend to flatter Reform but it is not winning by-elections and is not nurturing any new talent. Meanwhile, Badenoch is turning the disarray to her advantage. The next election is wide open.

In my view, it is (in theory) entirely possible for them to turn it around, but that would require leadership abilities that simply aren’t present anywhere on the right. What irritates me especially is how these tiresome party political shenanigans are completely neglecting the issues they could turn to their advantage.

Yesterday Farming UK reported that Britain now has fewer than 200 abattoirs thanks to onerous regulation. Britain’s shrinking network of small abattoirs is leaving livestock farmers with fewer routes to market and raising fresh concerns over the future of local meat supply chains, the NFU has warned. This is an issue I’ve raised countless times, not least because it’s one of those areas where hard policy would make all the difference.

One of the reasons policy development is so vital for parties of the right is so that they can identify issues (and corresponding solutions) and mount campaigns on those issues to win over the people who care about them. You can't just mong on about immigration all the time.

This ought to be prime territory for a party like Reform - especially since it is one of those areas that would most benefit from deregulation enabled by Brexit. Clarkson's Farm has already raised awareness of this issue, along with the injustice of the farm inheritance tax and the dismal TB testing regime - and they could secure much wider backing to advance their own policy ideas. Similarly, when Rupert Lowe is notionally a farmer, why hasn't he made an effort? If they want an agriculture policy, here's a starter for ten. It seems like the right has completely forgotten how to do politics, and spends most of its time harvesting social media engagement, then wonders why it is failing.

If I were in charge of Reform/Restore, I would make a point of putting a shadow team together, comprised of people with relevant sector experience (and not the usual blowhards), and give them each a research budget and two months to come up with a comprehensive policy to form the backbone of a manifesto, and then I would identify the most urgent issues and have each of the shadow team mount their own issue specific campaigns to promote their own policies.

I would be looking to win over entire sectors with specific policies. Farmers would be an easy hit by addressing IHT, OV fees and TB testing, and then I would have a health spokesman making massive noise about the shitty state of Britain's maternity services with a view to securing the votes of women and new mothers. I would run a campaign on establishing proper truck stops and revising the stupid EU tachograph rules, in favour of something more sensible.

Then, instead of trotting out the usual hackneyed slop about Peelian principles and bobbies on the beat in smart uniforms, I would launch a police policy aimed at restoring police morale, and set out reforms that would have every copper and ex-copper in the land voting for me.

I would have my spokesmen going out to livestock auctions, trade shows, and anywhere else there's an audience for well crafted policy. I would make a big deal of defence policy and get all the veterans associations on side, and I would craft a sports policy that would get young athletes interested. I'd have an X account for every policy area to run their own respective campaigns and have the main account retweet them. I wouldn't have poor Laila Cunningham going on telly to improvise and make excuses for lack of policy.

More than that, I would make sure that everyone on the top team was absolutely fluent in the key points of every policy, to stop them making dicks of themselves, and I wouldn't let the main X account tweet any old slop. It would be there to promote hard policy to establish a reputation for competence and seriousness, and to look like I was capable of running a government. I certainly wouldn't spend all day tweeting about a sad old fart going on an American podcast. But that's just me.

Probably the most important reason to do this is to build a party that can stand on its own two feet without its leader. A party that actually did this would clean up. As much as anything else, it would be proof of leadership. Britain's biggest problem is that the people who engage with politics have forgotten how to DO politics.

The point here is that while immigration remains a leading concern, along with the cost of living, these are no all consuming issues for much of the country and parties have to demonstrate that they are capable of governing, and have a command of the issues beyond the usual narrow selection of populist gripes. They need to realise that their current approach simply isn’t working.

As I have illustrated so many times, policy is multi-functional. It provides an intellectual foundation for all your subsequent comms and campaigns while contributing towards a reputation for seriousness and expertise. If you don't have a plan for power, there is no point in obtaining power. Best of all, even supposing I'm completely wrong about this, there is nothing at all lost by producing it, especially when so much can be accomplished in a short time with the proper motivation.

Meanwhile, you might have noticed I’m pressing quite hard for paid subscriptions at the moment. There is a particular formula you must follow to please the X algorithm, and it would seem that upsetting the populist right with things they do not want to hear is not making me any friends - to the point where I’m effectively shadow-banned and demonetised - just as we’re approaching silly season when politics tails off anyway. This is not optimal.

To me this pleading feels a lot like tin rattling, which is not something I like doing thus do not do it very often, but then I notice that Triggernometry and Matt Goodwin do it (both of whom are coining it), so why shouldn’t I? In terms of spelling out where the right is going wrong, and what can be done to fix it, this Substack has been ahead of the game time and time again, and is continually vindicated. Combined with the free-to-view work on manifestoproject.org, nobody can say I haven’t made a positive contribution.

I do appreciate that I can be repetitive, but as the reaction to the post I wrote the other day demonstrates, you have to keep saying these things in the hope that a moment will arise when the audience is receptive. All the same, with so much work now going into the Manifesto Project I’m going to diversify and write about a wider range of subjects. There are still some unresolved debates that would benefit from an airing. As such, if you would kindly share these articles, and take out a paid subscription (or donate), I would be hugely grateful.

As part of the Defence Investment Plan, Britain and the Netherlands signed a £2.4 billion maritime partnership. The agreement will equip both nations with new amphibious transport ships based on a Dutch design, built in UK shipyards with Dutch industrial involvement. Each country will operate four vessels.

At 160 metres long and displacing around 15,000 tonnes, these ships will carry troops, vehicles, equipment, and drones. Their flight decks are optimised for current and future long-range uncrewed systems, supporting the Royal Navy’s shift toward a hybrid fleet.

Current thinking is that amphibious assault is an entirely obsolete concept, which I suppose is what prompts the switch from the Bay Class RFA ships. I can see the logic. The Navy would rather have smaller, multi-functional ships that can be in more places at once than big lumbering vessels like HMS Albion, which only really exist to support large-scale amphibious operations. A capability, it is argued, that the QE carriers can handle just as well.

I have not fully resolved this debate in my own head yet. To my mind, the ability to deliver supplies and vehicles to places without a port facility still seems essential, and LPDs are endlessly useful. It is better to have it as a limited reserve capability than to be entirely without it. This new concept could be more useful if we can have more of them and they are optimised for deploying unmanned vessels. I am warming to the MoD’s decision. I am just not entirely confident that we will actually get them.

The real question is not whether unmanned vessels have a role in modern naval warfare (they clearly do) but whether the “hybrid navy” concept, and the growing overreliance on unmanned platforms it encourages, holds up under scrutiny. Unmanned systems fall into three basic categories, each with its own structural weaknesses.

Small and cheap. These are short-lived and short-range by design, more akin to guided munitions than ships. Ukraine’s successful use of small explosive uncrewed surface vessels against the Russian Black Sea Fleet illustrates the point: they excel as one-shot, expendable weapons against targets of opportunity, but they are poorly suited as persistent fleet assets that substitute for warships. Their limited endurance, payload, and seakeeping become liabilities when treated as stand-ins for real naval presence.

Intermediate. This awkward middle tier includes vessels large enough for sustained surveillance, escort, or logistics roles. Without a crew to handle the countless routine tasks that keep a ship operational (a leaking seal, a fouled filter, a software glitch) they lack resilience. Because they are the most “useful,” they also tend to be the most overworked: tasked constantly, maintained rarely, and worn out far faster than a comparable crewed vessel.

Very big and very expensive. These function as crewless capital ships, and the logic collapses under its own weight. A platform costly enough to carry advanced sensors, serious weapons, or a large magazine is too valuable to risk. Commanders will hesitate to deploy it aggressively, requiring it to have escorts and protection like any other high-value unit. This quietly negates the rationale for making it uncrewed in the first place.

Worse, if it carries sensitive capabilities (targeting AI, novel sensors, or secure communications) it becomes a high-priority target for adversaries in peacetime. The goal is not destruction but capture and study. A crewed warship boarded in international waters is an act of war. A robot boat towed away for a few hours is a “misunderstanding” (grey-zone theft with built-in deniability).

This is not hypothetical. In August and September 2022, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy twice attempted to seize U.S. Navy Saildrone Explorer USVs in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, towing one away before U.S. forces intervened; one drone returned with cameras missing. In December 2016, China seized a U.S. Navy unmanned underwater glider in the South China Sea. No crew means no resistance, leaving only diplomatic pressure to recover the hardware (and any data it may have yielded in the interim).

A more mundane but equally serious issue is the maritime environment itself. Salt water is unforgiving to moving parts and exposed electronics. This challenge is evident in efforts like the UK Ministry of Defence’s push for tri-service common drone platforms, including Project VANTAGE. That programme adapts the British Army’s land-proven Nyan one-way effector drone (already fielded in Estonia) for ship launch by the Royal Navy.

A design validated for transport across fields is not automatically suited for a heaving deck in Force 6 seas. The naval variant requires significantly more sealing, corrosion protection, and marinisation. What sounds like a minor upgrade on paper cascades into added weight, cost, and delays. A platform built to naval standards from the start is neither as common nor as cheap as a shared tri-service brochure suggests.

This concept is not new, and history offers cautionary lessons. Germany’s WWII Linse boats were radio-controlled explosive craft guided by a nearby manned vessel. On paper, they offered a way to attack Allied shipping without risking crews. In practice, they were a near-total failure. Deployed at Anzio, off Normandy, and at Antwerp in 1944, they achieved few confirmed successes, proved barely seaworthy in rough conditions, and incurred heavy losses among the operators who had to guide them close before bailing out.

Crucially, the “unmanned” boats were never truly autonomous. They relied on a crewed control vessel operating nearby and exposed to the very fire the concept aimed to avoid. Today’s uncrewed systems often fall into the same trap: remove the crew from the vessel, and you still need crewed platforms nearby to launch, control, defend, and recover it (reintroducing much of the risk and cost the approach was meant to eliminate).

Across all three tiers (and across eight decades of attempts) the pattern holds. Unmanned vessels tend to be either too limited to make a decisive difference, too overworked to endure, or too valuable to employ boldly.

A hybrid navy built on this foundation is not obviously cheaper, more survivable, or more effective than the fleet it aims to supplement. It may simply relocate familiar vulnerabilities to platforms with no one aboard to defend them. Uncrewed systems have valuable niche roles as force multipliers, expendable scouts, or attritable strikers. But they are no panacea. Effective naval power still rests on capable, resilient, crewed platforms that can absorb punishment, improvise under stress, and sustain operations in contested waters. The hybrid vision should complement that core strength, not erode it.

As with just about every procurement decision, you can find compelling arguments from serious people for any side of the argument. Making the right call is hard. Getting it wrong can be disastrous. It is always a tough call to make because we are only ever one defence innovation away from entire doctrines becoming obsolete.

This is especially true of the modern battlefield, where the emergence of drones has raised serious questions about the future usefulness and viability of expensive attack helicopters such as the Apache. Some envisage a role for them as battlefield controllers, able to direct drones. I am not wholly convinced either way. While the helicopters are fatally vulnerable on the modern battlefield, I do not recall a time when that has not been true (helicopter attrition statistics from Vietnam tend to confirm).

But then our pivot towards drones is just as questionable, given that counter-drone technologies are emerging that again change the arithmetic. As such, while it is preferable to have a technological edge on drone warfare, it helps to have a plan B, and a lot of reserve capability.

While strategists and equipment buyers operate to complex defence doctrines, we are never fully prepared for the kinds of wars we end up fighting. Make do and mend is part of the job. One anecdote that sticks in my mind really underscores the true nature of modern warfare. In the run-up to the attacks on Port Stanley, as the Avro Vulcan was being phased out, training for long-haul missions with inflight refuelling had lapsed and refuelling probes had been removed. A vital component of a refuelling probe was salvaged from the officers’ mess at RAF Waddington, where it was being used as an ashtray.

We see similar last-minute improvisations on the battlefield in Ukraine, repurposing long-obsolete kit. The Ukrainians are making great use of ex-RN Falklands-era Sea Kings and the sixty-year-old FV432. It would seem that no kit is ever truly obsolete. It is tactics that become obsolete. While redundant reserve capacity can be expensive to maintain and keep ready, it is better to have it than not. As such, it seems to me that our defence doctrine should keep that in mind.

Returning to the question of navy capability, now is a good time to question the entire concept of what a modern navy looks like. Looking at the Type 45 destroyers side by side with modern frigates, the basic design concepts appear to be merging. The trend is toward a standard multifunctional design where the main variable is size and weapons fit. It seems sensible to develop longer-life platforms that can be fitted and re-fitted for different missions.

As such, it becomes a question of how best to spend limited budgets. Concentrating funding on just a handful of ships might be optimal for defending domestic waters, but less so if the goal is global reach. Again we find that defence procurement is far downstream of foreign policy.

Meanwhile, what is not helping is a change of defence doctrine every time we have a change of government. This leads to a mishmash of tactically incompatible equipment. What matters, then, is the industrial capacity to re-purpose and reinvent at short notice. As such, defence industrial policy is more important than whatever kit-stroking defence pundits are saying. There has never been a war where we have not had to improvise, and that isn’t going to change. If that is held as a constant in our defence thinking, it doesn’t especially matter if our procurement decisions are flawed.

I struggle to think of any X accounts I couldn’t live without, but if I had to pick a top five list, Steve Loftus would be one of them, and not just because he wrote this today…

I don't think Reform will win in 2029 any more, I think they will self implode well before then, and if not the pressure and focus of a campaign will do it. But if they do, this is what will happen.

325+ MPs. 315+ of them brand new. A Government requiring 120 people to run it and 110 of them can't find a bathroom never mind have the first clue how anything should be done. The Minister for Housing will be a guy that ran an estate agents the week before.

Most of them will be poorly vetted, those that haven't already been outed in the campaign for fraud, corruption, racist tweets etc will now be found out in Government. There will be turmoil, pressure and calamity like Farage has never seen.

Support is based on enthusiasm for change, but it's factional and shallow, once it becomes clear that it's a shit show there will be mass defections, more than half their MPs will likely be former Tory councillors or MPs. Those the Tories don't want back will go Indy just to disassociate themselves from the debacle.

Every day the papers will be full of Reform drama. Policy failures, in fighting, defections, leaks, scandals etc. Polling will drop from low 30's which just got them the win to mid teens within months.

Farage, a man whose ego relies on being the popular insurgent will hate being the failed incumbent and unable to handle it.

Donations will dry up. Those "big hitters" from the private sector they plan to help run departments will head for the hills as if a tsunami is coming, if they even get on board in the first place.

It will be chaos and disaster the likes of which have never been seen before. It will make the last 2 Governments look like nirvana.

It will end with him resigning, or them losing a majority, likely both. And he will blame the civil service and institutional bias for his failings.

The replies to his thread are similarly realistic. He further remarks that “It will get worse when the media and public really start paying attention in a GE campaign. Tactical voting will also play a bigger part then ever before, with the visceral dislike many have for Farage making them vote for whoever can keep Reform out”.

Of course, nothing said here is anything new to readers of this blog. All of Reform’s woes stem from its structural defects which are all a product of Farage’s failings as a leader, and as a man.

This latest donor debacle, and Farage’s misfiring by-election stunt, is not doing the party any good. Reform’s future is now exclusively tied up in how awful the Burnham administration is, but that alone does not make Reform fit to govern. Of all the parties on the right, the Tories look like the more serious proposition, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that now starts showing in the polls.

This also has ramifications for Restore Britain. Restore is proving adept at social media engagement farming, but it’s now conclusively proven that popularity in a small corner of X and pandering to American audiences does not translate into polling success. Moreover, Restore supporters should be aware that Restore has all the same conceptual and structural defects. The party is built around a figurehead rather than an ideology, and while the party attempts policy, they are going through the motions without understanding what they’re doing and why.

For Restore, the little policy development they’re doing is little more than a tick box exercise. It doesn’t inform their communications and it doesn’t shape their strategy. It brings back recollections of Arron Banks’s dismal Leave.EU campaign which had no intellectual underpinnings and its social media output was chaotic and often crass. I doubt the millions spend on Banks’s vanity project made the slightest impact on the referendum result.

A structured approach would involve settling on a specific ideology and reinforcing it with policy, while at the same time developing a strong team of like-minded spokesmen who know their own system of thought inside out. That is what builds resilience to media scrutiny. Expertise brings credibility and is insulation against the kind of embarrassment we saw yesterday.

Reform routinely demonstrate that you can only get so far on populist vibes. At some point you have to look like you’re a government in waiting, and only serious policy can do that. Badenoch seems to understand this, even if her eventual policies will be the wrong solutions to yesterday’s problems.

A lot of my insight comes from having engaged in the process. I‘ve spent the week doing some extensive upgrades to polices on the Manifesto Project. I’m pleased with the way it’s turned out. I really do enjoy the process because I have to cover so many subjects and go deeper than I’ve ever been before, so it’s a massive learning opportunity that expands my horizons.

With it being over a year since I originally wrote policies for it, I’ve had my eye on a number of subject areas, keeping an eye on developments, to discover a lot of things I originally wrote were superficial or conceptually flawed, illustrating that policy development is a process, and if parties are only just starting up then they’ve probably left it too late, even if they have access to expertise that I don’t.

The rookie mistake is setting about policy form a year zero perspective without regard to current government policy and direction of travel. No government has the luxury of starting from scratch. For instance, if I were starting defence policy from scratch, I would probably scrap GCAP as an already obsolete concept, but we are past the point of no return with that, so you have to build policy around what you’ll be working with when you get to power. Same goes for the navy. The QE carriers are a fact of life.

The other problem I encountered was recycling policies I wrote for the Homeland Party. I wrote them from an explicitly nationalist perspective, even though they went counter to my free market instincts, particularly on the NHS and housing. Defence was another area with ideological conflicts.

This, incidentally, is why Restore Britain is going to have yet more problems with its nationalist supporters. Even if it is successful in driving away the worst of the neo-nazi headbangers, doctrinal nationalism still has major conflicts with the Brexity boomerism of Lowe.

Here, I note that Restore has taken on Henty Bolton as a national security advisor. I don’t know precisely what is worldview is but he will likely understand that defence policy is downstream of foreign policy, and where the party sees itself in the international order. This matters because doctrinal nationalists are profoundly anti-NATO (they regard it as Zionist captured) and on that score have a lot in common with the far left. Your position on NATO is fairly fundamental when it comes to defence policy, especially procurement.

Similarly, nationalists are ethno-collectivists and have very socialist ideas about housing. Personally, I think the very idea of social housing is offensive. There is never going to be a fair way of deciding who gets subsidised housing, especially when it is rationed. It will always create a soul crushing race to the bottom and create welfare dependency enclaves. The excessive demand for council housing is symptomatic of a broader market failure, which is not remedied by building more social housing.

As such, the more Restore seeks to keep the nationalists in the tent, the more friction there is likely to be over fundamental areas of policy, and the more compromises it makes, the less coherent it is. This is why a party has to set out a definition from the outset and build its policy platform accordingly. If people disagree with it, they have to go elsewhere. Ultimately, the definition has to align with the politics of the leader. You can’t be all things to all people. Politics is the art of persuasion, bringing people to your way of thinking.

Having made a number of policy improvements to the Manifesto Project, I’m fairly satisfied with the shape it’s in now. There’s a balance to be struck between detail and verbosity and I think I’ve got it about right, but the important thing is to never consider the process complete. Every policy areas is evolving at lightning pace. Policing, justice and health policy rapidly falls out of date, especially if it is not written with existing developments in mind. This is where Restore’s police policy is weak. It made no reference to the Home Office’s own white paper.

While Restore is at least making an attempt at policy, which is more than you can say for Reform, it is, on the whole, amateur hour stuff. You soon learn there is an art to it, and there is no substitute for having a structured methodology and a set of foundational principles - which Restore does not have. Developing policy in silos rather is a big part of why manifestos end up pulling in different directions. Ultimately, manifestos exist as the basis of your to do list when you reach power. If you haven’t done the thinking, you chances of succeeding in office are minimal. This is a big part of why Brexit turned out to be such a monumental wasted opportunity.

Where I find I’m much more sympathetic to the right as a whole is that they are always going to struggle for serious people because serious people are in short supply generally, and they tend to be smart enough to give politics a hard swerve. Frankly, you have to question the judgement of anyone who devotes most of their runtime to politics. The sacrifice to reward ratio is not great. Part of the job for any emergent party is to identify and nurture new talent - which is not easy. This is something the right consistently fails to do. We’re still laundering the same old faces.

As such, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of mileage in the dissident right. Both Restore and Reform are contingent on their figureheads, both a single point of failure, each carrying major liabilities of their own. If there is one thing Lowe and Farage have in common it’s their casual attitude to details. Lowe wouldn’t hold up much better under the same scrutiny, nor will Restore’s finances. Neither party can withstand the departure of their leaders.

All of this bodes well for the Tories, especially now that Badenoch is determined to part company with the failed ideas that saw then so badly mauled in 2024. She has rejected former Conservative MPs as candidates for her party at the next election because they support net zero. That, I suppose, is progress but her party is still comprised of the same deadbeats who unleashed the Boriswave, not least her shadow foreign secretary.

Meanwhile, Badenoch’s forays into policy have not yielded impressive results. She is imposing the same kind of discipline on her party when it comes to ECHR withdrawal which will prove to be a slow-motion car crash. Similarly, her policy commission on social cohesion and integration, which reports back in time for conference season, is likely to be a serious of half-measures better suited to 2006 than 2026. Reversing the Boriswave and bringing Islamic sectarianism under control is going to require policies which are too rich for the blood of most Tories. There is still no basis to trust the party, nor can we escape the fact that most of what ails the country is a direct consequence of fourteen years of Tory rule.

With the party options being so unappealing, I now advise, nay implore, people to vote locally with greater care. It’s not use complaining about the calibre of politicians when people vote for brands over candidates. You cannot delegate the quality vetting process to the parties themselves. You have to decide for yourself who is up to the job. On that basis, I probably will vote the the incumbent Tory over a political novice from the dissident right.

While I maintain my view that we aren’t voting our way out of this, it’s going to help if we at least have halfway sentient MPs who will eventually reach the right conclusions given enough exposure to reality.

As a point of housekeeping, I would like to thank those of you who have donated or taken out a subscription to this Substack. Small regular sums make a huge difference and allows me to continue even when there is so little cause for optimism. Since Farage is in hot water over donation transparency, I would like to clarify that nobody has given me large sums for “personal security”, though this month there is almost enough excess to repair the air conditioning on my dilapidated Vauxhall, for which my other half thanks you especially.

Julia Hartley-Brewer and Reform’s Laila Cunningham have clashed over whether Reform UK is ready for a general election. Hartley-Brewer observes, as a matter of fact, that Reform does not have a defence policy or a defence spokesman. Poor Laila Cunningham is left, for the second time today, to paper over the cracks. Ironically, her X handle is “@policylaila”.

For me, this could not be more of a vindication if it tried. This is not a hostile TV interview. Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV is about as Reform friendly as it gets, and even she cannot escape the fact that Reform is not a government in waiting. It does not have shadow spokesmen on anything, and it has zero policy to speak of. Were there an election this year, it would be abundantly obvious to any floating voter that Reform has no governing ability.

And there’s a reason or that. The same reason it’s always been. Nigel Farage. He directs the party. He shapes the party. This is on him. We were told some time ago that the party was undergoing a process of professionalisation but the cupboard is still bare. Reform is still, in essence, a one man band, with no intellectual foundation and its media team are left to improvise when asked where the party stands on vital issues.

Had the party had anything approaching policy, this would have been a perfect moment to hit back at critics, and a chance to build a reputation for credibility, especially in the wake of Labour’s Defence Investment Plan - which, the more you look at it, looks like a round of stealth defence cuts. Moreover, if Hartley-Brewer has noticed Reform’s total absence of seriousness then so has Reform’s opponents.

As much as anything, a decent policy platform would have come in very handy about now. While Farage is under the microscope, Cunningham could have said “We are the only serious party of the right with a compromise plan for power”. But nobody can say that with a straight face. This is presumably what Rupert Lowe meant when he said “I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power”. Not that his own shambolic enterprise is faring any better.

I have long pointed out that the absence of policy and a plan would prove to be Reform’s biggest liability, only to be told that I’m “sperging out”, and that policy doesn’t matter because nobody reads manifestos. But it turns out that policy is everything. It’s what separates the wheat form the chaff. It tells us who is serious and who isn’t.

This is a point I’ve raised with just about anyone who will listen, only for the point to be spectacularly missed time and time again, by people who don’t even know what serious policy looks like. This is the problem with the slop-right. It is comprised entirely of chancers who think you can coast along along on vibes and leave the details until later.

I noted this on X earlier. The right has got into the tragic habit of rewarding people for telling it what it already thinks. It likes the confirmation. It likes the feeling that its frustrations are justified and the problems are straightforward. That’s what gets the likes, shares and speaking slots. The people who do it well get built up, even when they’re just regurgitating the audience’s existing view in stronger language.

This dynamic is is classic populism but social media monetisation has made it worse. Once there’s actual money attached to keeping an audience engaged and happy, the incentive to stick to safe, validating material becomes much stronger. People can now build livelihoods, or at least decent side incomes, by producing the kind of slop that performs well in these spaces.

The result is a professionalised version of the same problem. The figures who rise are the ones best at giving the audience what it wants to hear, because that’s what the platforms and the monetisation systems reward. Meanwhile, serious organisational development, or thinking through the practicalities of governing don’t generate the same returns, so they get less attention and less funding.

The trouble is this doesn’t actually move anything forward. It produces content and it produces engagement, but it doesn’t produce the policy work, the organisational ability, or the institutional understanding needed to change how the state operates. Those things are slower and less satisfying. They don’t flatter the people listening in the same way, and they don’t perform as well online - and the people who should be doing the work think it’s beneath them.

This is now the dominant model on much of the right. Good leadership should rise above it, but there is no sign of that. Restore Britain, especially, is an engagement harvesting operation. A slop factory. The incentives are clear: say the things people already believe, say them forcefully, and you get rewarded. Try to talk about the practical difficulties of actually governing, or the need for detailed preparation, and you get far less traction. Nobody wants to hear that the problems are more complicated than they thought, or that winning an election won’t automatically fix them.

Over time this selects for a certain kind of figure and a certain kind of output. It builds a culture where validation matters more than substance, and where the main skill required is reading the room rather than thinking through what would actually need to be done (something the slop right is actively hostile towards). Consequently, when the opportunity to govern arrives, the people who rose under this system are often the ones least equipped to make use of it. See Johnson, Boris. This is how my predictions so often turn out to be correct.

It’s not that the people doing this are necessarily cynical. A lot of them probably believe what they’re saying. The issue is that the system they’re operating in doesn’t select for the qualities that would be useful in government. It selects for the qualities that work on social media and at conferences. Those are not the same thing. That's why you end up with Reform and Restore instead of something that might actually work.

This is ultimately why I took the time to develop the Manifesto Project. I had hoped that someone with more clout than me would at least take on the point that it is necessary to develop an intellectual foundation and present it properly, even if they disregarded everything else I say - but it seems even that was too much to hope for, and now the best hope for the right is falling apart in realtime. Its leader is tainted and there’s nothing about his party that we can take seriously.

On a final note, while this vindication feeds my ego, it does not pay the bills. The money is in producing rage bait slop over on X, which I am not inclined to do. If you want to see more development on the Manifesto Project, I humbly ask you to consider a paid subscription to this Substack (or donate here). Thank you.

Developing a fully comprehensive manifesto would ordinarily be beyond the means of any one person. Having been a political blogger for approaching twenty years, I was in good position to set out a basic framework and add to it, but an effort from a single individual was always going to lack the necessary depth.

It is my view that political parties should set out a basic framework then acquire the necessary expertise to develop it, preferably pulling in as much real world experience as possible. That is certainly within the means on parties such as Restore Britain and Reform UK. You have to as serious questions about why they haven’t. If they’re only just cranking into gear, they’ve already left it too late.

What changes the game, slightly, is the emergence of AI. There are now an array of powerful writing and research tools that can augment this kind of work. It comes with the caveat that none of what it produces is trustworthy. Luckily, there are certain tells. Once you play with the technology for a while, you soon pick up an instinct for what is AI generated slop. The last thing we need is more AI padding.

My original approach was to give AI a hard swerve, which was absolutely the correct approach in setting out the basic framework for this manifesto. If you want to to say what you mean then you have to do the thinking yourself. There is no substitute for having organised your own thoughts through the laborious process of traditional writing.

Where AI comes in useful is to offer critiques where expert consultation is not available – especially in the middle of the night when I do most of my thinking. I’ve found it useful in identifying gaps and suggesting alternative approaches – especially where I lack expertise.

Having set out my own policy objectives and priorities, tools such as Claude AI can bring them up to standard. In my case, I then take the output and feed it through Grok to improve the readability. They each have their own merits, but both require close editorial supervision. In many cases, I end up doing manual final edits and tweaks. That’s going to be a slow process over the next month or so.

Here there is balance to be struck between depth and verbosity. There is a middle ground between the pointless empty slogans of Restore and Reform UK, and more weighty policy papers from specialist think tanks. Political parties should make greater use of think tanks. They provide and entirely free resource, and providing intellectual direction for political parties is a big part of what they are actually for. There is zero point in going into competition with them. They have the funding and the expertise. Why not utilise it? In my case, I’ve turn up some interesting approaches just by training AI tools on outfits such as the Centre for Social Justice.

I’ve been banging the drum for three years now for parties to have detailed manifestos – proving they have thought through what they’re doing. Restore Britain has responded to this by producing bloated and extruded verbal material to give the outward appearance of effort, but it still amounts to the same tropes and assumptions.

The problem with this is that most won’t even bother to read it and those who do will be unconvinced. Document depth goes towards providing reassurance that they’ve properly understood the issues, but having built their knowledge base on their own untested assumptions, the end product is never going to be a decent standard.

In fact, one of the reasons I know populist slop when I see it is because I have in the past been guilty of the same. Like most on the right, I took it as an article of faith that were must leave the ECHR, and that it was a prerequisite for wider reforms. An open minded investigation changed my mind. The same goes for the dogma on purging quangos and reducing the size of the state. It turns out the last thig we need is another top-down reorganisation. What is needed is better intellectual direction, leadership, and accountability mechanisms. there is no substitute for original thinking.

Having now completed an AI augmentation sweep of the Manifesto Project, I think it’s in a lot better shape than it was, with some very necessary improvements to flow and clarity, with a few new ideas, but it is still essentially the same and built along the same principles. There are still gaps in it, and the improvement process never stops. Policy development is a continuous improvement process, and must take into account current developments and the present day circumstances. We do not have the luxury of developing year zero approaches for an ideal world.

With AI becoming more powerful all the time, there is a temptation to lean fully into it, but that then breaks the contract. You can’t expect the reader to invest intellectual effort into reading something when none has gone into producing it.

Moreover, if you didn’t write something, you won’t have the intimate relationship with that’s written in your name and you won’t be able to defend it or take pride in it. That, ultimately, is what’s missing from the populist right. Everything they do is done with the bare minimum thought and effort, and it shows. They take no pride in what they do, assuming that because slop passes with their fanbase, everyone else will be as satisfied as they are. While AI certainly has its uses, there is no substitute for people who care enough to know what they’re talking about.

On a final note, countless hours have now gone into the Manifesto Project. While nobody will avail themselves of it, not least because of who wrote it, a body of ideas has inherent worth. It will no doubt inform the commentary of this Substack as we creep closer towards an election, where again we will see parties of the right making basic tactical errors simply because they haven’t invested in building an intellectual foundations.

I assume this kind of insight is valuable to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. On that basis, I humbly ask you to consider a paid subscription (or donate here). There are now perverse incentives to produce rage bait slop over on X, which I am not inclined to do - but that’s proving to be an expensive choice.

This week I’ve added all new policies to the Manifesto Project on agriculture, fishing, planning, energy, culture, welfare reform, higher education, DOGE< foreign aid, pensions, policing, defence and transport. My brain is slightly fried now.

It does help, though, that I have years of blogging under my belt and a good grounding in most topics, but I’ve found Grok AI very useful this time around. I've established a pretty good working methodology now.

It's not as simple as just telling it to write a section. If that worked then the entire site would be little more than AI slop. You first have to write a framework based on your existing knowledge. You then have to outline your values and red lines, what you want it to ignore (particularly climate lobby dogma), and know which expert sources to point it at.

You then have to interrogate and verify responses. It's then a question of homing in on what is substantive and what's filler. I want it to be comprehensive but not uselessly verbose.

When I last did any major writing on the site, I hit a bit of an inspiration wall and ran out of ideas. I hoped feedback from readers would spur some developments but I’m getting into the weeds on some issues now, where you need a thinking partner with specialist knowledge. You basically have to offer insight on everything from submarine delivery and drone warfare though to TB testing, welfare reform and taxation. No single human can do this.

This is where Grok is a bit of game changer. It really just automates the process I was already using by scanning the internet for existing expertise and looking at it through the prism of my stated values. The plan is now to beef up all the remaining sections and produce a summary manifesto with legislative recommendations - which might then translate into some story of plan.

As I noted the last time around, this kind of exercise gives you some indication of the scale of the task ahead to restore any kind of functionality and sanity to the British government. The process itself has changed my mind on a number of topics. When I originally wrote the manifesto as a raw PDF for Ukip, it was pretty boilerplate dissident-right stuff - leaving the ECHR and purging entire departments, but when you look at what’s involved and what different arms of government actually do, it gives you a whole new perspective. It’s why I can’t take Danny Kruger and his “bonfire of quangos” seriously.

As such, it suggests to me that if parties gearing up for a 2029 election are only just getting down to the business of policy development then they’ve probably left it too late - especially when the right is largely self-satisfied and entirely convinced of its own solutions, regardless of the implementation implications. Certainly we see this from Restore Britain, whose meagre collection of policies are based on blue sky thinking without any reference to what is going on in the real world right now.

The sad part is that there is very little point in this exercise anymore. There was never any real chance of Reform acknowledging the need for policy, the Tories have already blown it, and Restore is apparently in its death throes as its online nationalist base walks away.

I suppose it still serves as an example of what can be done if properly motivated, and at least people can’t say I never have anything positive to contribute. Even in its current state, it is still the best right wing policy prospectus, and would probably remain so without me lifting a finger. Regardless, it’s there to read should you find yourself at a loose end or needing to kill time on a long train ride. We’re not voting our way out of this anyway.

I’m presently shadow-banned on X, therefore demonetised, for reasons not explained. There appears to be a heavy bias in favour of slop which I am not inclined to produce. This, though, is a good thing in that it focuses my mind on more productive endeavours.

It’s been a while since I touched the Manifesto Project. You have to be in a certain mind state to think along those lines, and it’s also difficult to have any motivation when there’s no real outlet for this kind of work - and very little interest in it. Parties of the slop right are not interested in policy development. As such, the Manifesto Project is little more than personal academic exercise to help me develop my thinking. Having done the work myself it gives me a better grounding to evaluate the policy efforts of others as they are published. Sadly, it has no other use.

The original intent of the Manifesto Project was to provide a framework for what something like Restore Britain should look like, as a system of joined up policies based on a system of values. What we’ve seen instead from them is a collection of disparate attempts of varying quality in which they mistake length for sophistication, and there’s no joined-up thinking at all. They reluctantly recognise the need for policy but don’t understand the utility of it.

Their latest policy on policing prompted my to update my own efforts, using the Home Office’s recent white paper as the jumping off point, recognising that policy must take into account the current state of play. While blue sky thinking has its place, serious policy must integrate with reality. None of us have the luxury of remodelling the state according to our own perfect designs. As such, the UK Defence Investment Plan seemed like a good vector upon which to update and rewrite my defence policy.

At just over eleven thousand words, it’s about as long as it needs to be. It touches on most bases without going into too much detail while remaining true to an underpinning philosophy of adaptability, scalability and techno-realism. As ever, feedback is very much appreciated.

One of the reasons I write about the fringe right is because it’s where all the market signals are - and its the place where the ideological battle happen that dictate where the centre-right goes. Even the influence of micro parties is not trivial. Tiny Homeland played a big part in popularising remigration as a concept.

But this is why I still write about Restore Britain, even though my metrics tell me I’m boring my readers to death. It’s where the ideological friction on the right is most evident. There is a generational divide on the right which roughly divides along civnat/ethnat lines, and it’s where Tory free market capitalism clashes with the collectivism of far right fascism.

Personally, I think the game is already over. The civnats are the only thing stopping Restore becoming a far right ethnat party, and the ethnats were the only thing stopping it becoming a full blown boomer slop party. It lacked the skill to manage the contradiction. Conceptually flawed from the outset, it now begins the Habibification process, and its inevitable, torturous demise.

By the looks of it, the base just think its a matter of managing Lowe’s rhetoric, but Lowe’s wunderkinds are not going to resolve the party's internal ideological conflict by papering over the cracks with verbal sleight of hand tricks. There will be fundamental disputes in every major policy area.

Just take defence. On the one hand you have the Tory civnat tendency, and on the other, you have doctrinal nationalists. The former is broadly pro-Israel, pro-NATO, Ukraine sceptical, non-interventionist, but still Atlanticist. The latter is anti-Israel, isolationist, anti-NATO, and in many cases pro-Russia and anti-American.

You can't reconcile these two positions. There isn't a compromise. Any compromise is a deal breaker for nationalists, not least because of the obsessive hatred of Jews. To be pro-America is to be "zionist" (because America is controlled by you-know-who), and the isolationist tendency runs all the way through. All of this runs contrary to what Lowe instinctively believes, and we've already seen divergence on foreign policy between him and his lieutenants.

With such radically divergent approaches to foreign policy, you simply cannot arrive at a coherent defence policy - which is always downstream of your foreign policy posture. You can form up around a concept of armed neutrality, but that’s not going to be sufficiently rabid for either side.

The only way to avert vehement public disagreements is to avoid policy of any depth, or anything that is likely to trigger its own base, at which point you're yet another empty shell of a party, just like Reform, that doesn't know what it will do with power until it gets there - at which point it all falls apart. But you simply cannot present as a serious right wing party if you don't have a foreign and defence posture, not least because there are a lot of boomer veterans in the civnat base.

We can assume that Restore's defence posture will be very much informed by Henry Bolton, who will have a conventional Ukippy Tory mindset, and the moment he publishes anything, Restore's own base will start clucking. Doubtless, Downes/Pitt will attempt to editorialise and remove any of the ideological landmines, but that leaves your policy completely threadbare. If I were Bolton, I wouldn't sit idly by and let Beavis and Butthead scribble all over my policy with their crayons. It would be a resigning matter for me.

You will find similar ideological conflicts on housing, health and many other areas, because the fascists are ethnic collectivists and socialists, which doesn't tie up very well with the free market ideology of Lowe. Consequently, Restore will constantly be trying to appease a cohort of parasitic whingers who are likely to throw their toys out of the pram at any moment for virtually any reason you can think of.

Any attempt to make policy vaguely presentable to normies will set them off. Restore will also find they are unappeasable. You can't ride these two horses at once. Eventually one of them will gallop off in its own direction. Anyone who knows the ideological terrain could see this a mile off, but this lot can't because, Restore is run by idiots and they badly underestimate just how cranky their cranks are.

As ye shall not be the least bit surprised, I wasn't impressed by Restore's verbose policing policy. When you break it down, at least half the document is padding with a completely unrealistic and pointless implementation plan. Most of all, it's badly structured and badly written, lacking any obvious appreciation of the state we're in, or how the government intends to reform policing.

In my view, the 2026 Home Office white paper is the basis from which to build a policy response. Many of the gripes Restore raises about British policing are already well understood by the Home Office, and some of the measures the government's white paper proposes are actually quite sensible. Others, not so much. It is for political parties to look at the current state of play, and outline their course corrections rather than creating blue-sky fantasy blueprints based on hackneyed nostalgia.

In a PhD thesis, after the introduction, the first substantive section should be the literature review, with summarises the state of play. Only then can you establish your own thesis, which is supposed to build on what is, rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel. Policy making works much the same way. What the Restore paper does - apart from anything else - is re-emphasise that policy-making is a specific discipline, which very much has its own rules. It is not for amateurs, and requires a skill-set that is clearly lacking in most of those who are attempting it. I’d even include myself in that. I have half a clue, and that’s more than most, which is why I make the attempt.

As far as a policy outline goes, I think you can do a lot more with a lot less. Spurred by Restore's effort, I put a few hours into updating the policing section on the Manifesto Project, linking it with the broader ambitions for a right wing government.

Part of the problem with our police, I find, is a lack of of a driving mission, which explains its structural incoherence. The mission should dictate the structure. Restore, instead, opts for an ideological restructure to "restore" the police to a previous iteration - when modern Britain requires a much more mission driven approach - namely that of tackling the rampant organised crime and other issues related to mass immigration.

My effort is still a work in progress. Running at nearly seven thousand words, I could easily expand it to be twice as long and still come in at half the length of Restore's paper, while saying a great deal more. Readability, I think, is key, though its a moot point since the brains of Restore supporters capsize at the sight of a five paragraph tweet. They're not going to read either.

For my part, it's a just worthwhile thought exercise, and unlike Restore, I actually welcome ferocious criticism. My main difference in approach, policy wise, is that I don't place the same emphasis on present day gripes such as "woke police" and I don't think fixing the police in isolation is going to make much of a difference. Unless you also have a plan to fix the courts, the prisons, addiction services, local authority enforcement systems, welfare, and much else, even the best police force is just going to be sweeping leaves on a windy day. That's why a joined-up manifesto is necessary. Addressing policy in distinct silos is where politics as a whole is going wrong.

That said, I think we’re past the point where even good policy can repair the police. Being on X most of the time, I regularly see footage of the police when they’re not covering themselves in glory. I measure this against my own experience last year when I was arrested for a tweet. The consistent theme in these incidents is that the average plod is is thick, hopelessly indoctrinated, gullible, and unfit for the role. Fundamentally, it’s a people problem.

That’s where it gets depressing. We need intelligent, savvy, conscientious, courageous and physically fit people to do the job, and if those people exist (which they don’t), they wouldn’t pass the vetting, and they wouldn’t do such a shit job, especially with what we’re paying.

But it mainly comes down to the fact that such people no longer exist. Garbage in, garbage out. We are not a serious country, we are not a serious people, and we’ve let things get so badly degraded that it’s probably beyond our capacity to correct without strong leadership and coherent political direction - neither of which is coming any time soon. As unserious as Restore is, Reform is no better - and we still don’t yet know what kind of damage Andy Burnham will do. We might be in trouble.